Solace & Grief

by Foz Meadows

  ‘Sure,’ said Solace, trying to keep a straight face, and not quite succeeding.

  They sat. In actuality, it was a more complicated process than that: several people had to be jolted out of conversations and made to realise that, firstly, Evan had returned from his random club-circuit and brought someone with him, and secondly, they were being asked to move down so that he and the new chick could sit. This seemed to involve several people too many getting up at once and then sitting back down when they realised that not all of them had to move, but that some of them still did, and so on until everyone had sorted out whose drink was whose and what they'd been talking about.

  ‘So,’ said Evan, once all this was sorted. ‘Solace was wondering what this place is called – its real name, I mean. Any clues?’

  Jess shrugged. ‘Ask Manx, maybe? Hey, Manx!’

  On hearing his name called out, a young man turned. He was shorter than Solace by nearly a head and a half, with messy red-blond hair and mismatched eyes, one green, one brown. His nose and smile were crooked, but despite his size, he seemed perfectly proportioned, moving with a muscular, easy strength that was distinctly feline – appropriate, given his name. Walking over, he knelt by Evan and crossed his arms lazily on the armrest, looking impishly up at Jess.

  ‘You rang?’

  She nodded. ‘Solace asked what this place is called. I thought you might know.’

  By way of answer, he pointed towards the bar, where someone had nailed a sturdy-looking sign below a shelf of rainbow liqueur bottles. In faded yellow-on-black writing, it read:

  Welcome to the Gadfly. Come Get Stung!

  ‘The Gadfly?’ Solace said. ‘Weird. But also cool.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Manx. ‘Drinks should be here soon, by the way. It's Electra's round.’

  They chatted amiably for a while, during which time Solace finally relaxed. Manx, like Evan, was easygoing; unlike Evan, he had the knack of encouraging conversation. Jess was somewhere in between, alternately taking the lead and sitting aloof, leaving plenty of room for Solace to contribute.

  ‘Who's this? Someone new?’

  All four of them looked up. The speaker was a willowy blonde girl, dressed in a knee-length, bright blue dress, bottle green jacket and tan-coloured boots laced to just below the knee. Her eyes were grey and her face elfin. Presumably, this was Electra. Smiling, she offered Solace a glass full of brownish-black liquid, one of many perched on an expertly balanced tray. ‘You want a bourbon and Coke?’ she asked, by way of introduction. ‘Sorry I took so long. It's crowded tonight.’

  ‘Why not?’ Solace blinked, surprised by both offer and apology. She held out a hand. The glass was cool to the touch. The blonde girl grinned.

  ‘No problem. Enjoy!’

  With that, she sauntered off, laden with considerably fewer drinks than she had been some moments earlier, Manx, Jess and Evan having raided her supplies in less time than it took to blink. Cradling her glass, Solace looked up as a new song came on, surprised by the fact that, courtesy of Annamaria's CD collection, she actually recognised both track and artist: ‘Risingson’ by Massive Attack. Rhythm pulsed through her. The scent of alcohol vied with the warm salt of sweat, muggy and animal. Overhead, a green light flicked on, washing colour across their faces. It was almost like being in a jungle.

  ‘Electra's my housemate,’ said Manx, by way of explanation. ‘Well, warehouse-mate, actually. It's a pretty big place. This other guy, Glide, he lives there too, but pretty much everyone ends up crashing.’ He raised an eyebrow at Jess and Evan. ‘Actually, I can't remember the last time you two didn't crash. Don't you have homes to go to?’

  Evan shrugged lazily. ‘Hey, su casa es mi casa, right? Besides, it's not like you actually pay rent or anything.’

  ‘Neither do you!’

  ‘Yes, but our place is a basement. Literally. Paying good money for the non-privilege of storing stuff there would be madness, whereas in the grand hierarchy of squats, your warehouse ranks approximate to the Four Seasons. You going to drink that?’ He directed this last to Solace, who'd been contemplating her bourbon and Coke. For obvious reasons, she'd never drunk alcohol before, and after growing up around people like Kelly and Annamaria, she'd never really wanted to. But that had been before the warning, before she'd realised how artificial her life at the group home had been. Besides, drinking something which might make her sick was hardly a foray into the unknown. Under Evan's questioning gaze and the Vampire Cynic's reckless scorn, she nodded, tilted the glass to her lips and drank. The bourbon burned the back of her throat, but pleasantly so.

  After experiencing none of her usual queasy reactions to a new food, Solace concluded happily that alcohol fell into the category of Things I Can Consume. Seeing her enjoyment, Evan clinked his glass with hers and drained its contents in a single swallow.

  Jess sighed. ‘My brother drinks too much,’ she said, not without affection. ‘Just FYI.’

  ‘Spoilsport.’ Evan poked out his tongue, then turned to Solace, setting his empty glass down on the table. ‘Come on. I'll introduce you around.’

  In the next hour, Solace met more people than in the whole of her last two years combined. These were the friends who crashed at Manx and Electra's place; the Gadfly was their regular, and none of them cared that Solace had grown up in a group home. Early on, she'd been worried about explaining her situation. No one that Solace knew of had ever pitied her, a circumstance she had no desire to change. As things turned out, however, another of Evan's friends, Paige, had also been in care.

  ‘I lived with a couple of foster families,’ she explained cheerfully, when Solace asked. Paige was shorter even than Manx, with scruffy white-blonde hair shot through with streaks of pink and purple. ‘It wasn't that bad, but not fantastic either. I stayed for a few years, but eventually it just made sense to leave. Plus, Harper came with me. That was fun.’

  ‘Harper?’ asked Solace. She'd been keeping track of names, but this wasn't one she recognised. Paige scanned the room and tilted her head at a tall, athletic-looking, dark-skinned youth with bright brown eyes and an easy smile.

  ‘That's him.’

  As if sensing their scrutiny, Harper chose that moment to glance their way and acknowledge Paige before turning back to the girl beside him, a pale-eyed Goth. She wore clothes seemingly pick ’n’ mixed from The Matrix, a seventies punk band and the late Victorian era. Somewhat enviously, Solace took in her short, sleek black hair, running a hand self-consciously through her own tangles. She'd dried out considerably since entering the club, but still felt thoroughly unkempt. Misreading her expression, Paige made a derisive sound.

  ‘And that's Laine,’ she added. ‘Harper's got more time for her than me. We don't get along.’

  ‘Really?’ Curious, Solace turned back to the shorter girl. ‘How come?’

  Paige frowned. ‘About a year ago, she and Harper went out – pretty briefly, as things turned out, because lovely though Laine is capable of being, she's also kind of not. Then he and I had a fling, and she got pissed off. She's been mad at me ever since. In my defence, though, I didn't think she'd care. And also, I mean – come on. He's pretty hot.’

  Even the Vampire Cynic wasn't sure how to answer that, so Solace made do with nodding. Still, she must have blushed, because Paige started giggling.

  Hours slipped by. It occurred to Solace midway through the night that, despite her lack of experience, she seemed to be making friends. For the first time ever, she was part of a group. Evan and his friends were nice, not in the way that people are charitable or arrogant, but because they actually seemed to like her. Certainly, she could think of no other reason why, despite her total lack of cash, they continued to buy her drinks. In the face of alcohol and good company, any worries she might have had about the people she'd left behind or where she was headed next evaporated like so much steam.

  As the night wound on and the conversation flowed, Solace discovered many other things: that alcohol mixed with soft drink was flav
oursome, that she had a good capacity for it, and that, no matter how large a capacity for alcohol one has, it is never advisable to accept a challenge to race through a line of tequila slammers, particularly on an empty stomach. As it was, she and Jess tied, a feat that earned the competitors another round – Evan's – which of itself started a new competition: seeing who could find the bathroom first.

  ‘I thin’, I think this way,’ slurred Jess, fumbling along the wall. For the first time in her life, Solace found she was having difficulty seeing. No matter how hard she squinted, the world seemed to persist in sliding one metre to the left, so that any effort at keeping steady resulted in both of them lurching sideways.

  ‘Poss'bly,’ Solace muttered. Blinking, she stared ahead, finally making out a familiar shape. ‘Oh, luck. Look. A door.’

  ‘’S a lady on it. Bingo.’ Somewhat unceremoniously, Jess attempted to disentangle herself from Solace and rush in, with the practical result that the two of them got caught on each other's elbows. Jess fell into the door, the door swung open and Solace fell on Jess, who threw up on impact with the ground and at the press of Solace's knee in her kidneys.

  ‘Uk,’ said Solace, rolling heavily away. Being drunk was strange, she decided distantly: every part of her body felt as if it were between five and fifteen kilos heavier, and had begun acting accordingly without telling her which part weighed what. Especially her head which, she now realised, she had smacked on the tiles in the process of getting off Jess.

  ‘Ow,’ she said, and then, because it seemed appropriate, ‘bugger.’

  Unlike Jess, she made it to a toilet. Given her peculiar allergies, she was no stranger to – as Mrs Plumber had once delicately phrased it – the finer points of regurgitation, and knew what she was in for. Almost instinctively, she remembered to keep her hair well back from her face, to shift her knees so that they didn't get sore from prolonged kneeling, and to keep one arm wrapped around the porcelain in front of her so that when her head jerked down violently with the first retch – thus – she didn't crack her skull or fall over sideways.

  At a non-specific point in the future, by which time it was the present anyway, but which Solace was unable to appreciate owing to being passed out, Evan and Manx rescued her and Jess from the bathroom. Sequentially, this was followed by a series of vague impressions: being first dragged and then half-carried through the rain, an argument concerning who kept dropping whose sister's feet versus whose idea the all-girl tequila race had been, some falling and a few slurred words about dancing fish which made perfectly good sense at the time, a period of blackness and then a different, more insistent kind of blackness, which Solace took, correctly, to mean she'd woken up without having opened her eyes.

  Solace opened her eyes.

  The room consisted largely of shadow, and was in any case unfamiliar, with a ceiling that extended high overhead into darkness. The bed she was lying on creaked. The sheets were black, the mattress was soft and her head swam like spawning salmon in bear country. Solace gave a small groan and wondered where everyone was, and whether or not they'd seen her apparently miscreant liver in their travels. Brushing strands of hair out of her face, she rubbed her eyes and tried to wake up. Halfway through this process, she realised that she was currently, as of now, officially, seventeen. Seventeen, going on eighteen, she thought distantly, then pulled a face as the whole song bloomed in her subconscious like the aural equivalent of Paterson's curse. Thank you, Julie Andrews.

  There was a noise. Blinking, Solace turned to the right, momentarily fearful of having lost her virginity to the ultimate teenage stereotype. Her heart leapt into her throat at the sight of someone lying beside her, but the gods, it seemed, were merciful – it was only Jess, who was still passed out and snoring. As flashes of drunken memory returned with the slow clearing of her head, it occurred to Solace that perhaps she was in the warehouse where Manx and Electra lived with the as-yet unfamiliar Glide. Certainly, the room seemed big enough, and she had a dim recollection of seeing it from the outside, albeit from the perspective of someone only vertical by the grace of an arm around Evan's neck. The recollection of her own drunkenness made her feel guilty, but less so than if Jess hadn't met the same fate. Begrudgingly, she made a mental note not to drink so much next time. Restraint was good. Although, the Vampire Cynic added smugly, you did enjoy yourself.

  Shaking her head and regretting it almost instantly, she determined to find the others, apologise for throwing up, and figure out what was happening, in that order. Her throat was raw and her stomach gurgled uneasily, but given that Jess was still blacked out, she suspected her hangover wasn't as bad as it could have been, were she normal. Briefly, her lips twitched into a smile. Thank heaven for small mercies.

  Stretching, she padded over to the door. Manx's room, as she rightly suspected it to be, opened out onto a long, elevated walkway running around the entire top level of the warehouse. Several metal staircases went down to ground level at various junctures: looking up, Solace saw that much of the roof was in fact a skylight, the glass gone yellow and brown with accumulated filth. The upstairs rooms, of which there were many, reached from walkway to walls, while the downstairs space continued beneath their floors. Descending via the nearest flight of stairs, she saw that several massive metal columns supported the upstairs level, while in the dead centre of the warehouse, under the skylight, someone had, at some time or other, set up a kind of lounge room.

  ‘Kind of’ really was a necessary qualifier.

  A patchwork square of rugs covered the sunlit area: dark green shagpile, a natty red-and-orange Persian, a couple of lurid bathmats, something sleek and striped with white, blue and purple, a children's play-mat with cars and streets and houses patterned on the fuzz. There was also a spiral-bearing hangover from the seventies featuring what could only be described as heliotrope, several smaller rectangles, and biggest of all, a flat, black rug dotted with hundreds of tiny stars. On top of the rugs was an equally eccentric collection of chairs, lounges, cushions and beanbags in varying stages of decay. Two wooden dining chairs faced a dilapidated, low-slung couch, while a mound of soft, coloured things lay heaped against a dark red armchair so ancient that the leather was cracking and the stitches pulling away from the metal studs.

  In the middle of this disarray sat a round wooden table covered with chipped mugs, either half-full or empty, sticky glasses, ashtrays, a couple of homemade bongs, a scattering of feathers, rocks, shells and small bones, and for reasons better left unsaid, a sheep skull around which someone had seen fit to tie a broad pink ribbon.

  ‘You survived, then,’ said Manx, emerging from behind a column. Despite the silence of it, his arrival wasn't startling: rather, it made Solace feel more at home than if she'd been tiptoeing privately around someone else's house.

  ‘Apparently.’ She cocked an eye to the lounge. ‘Nice rugs.’

  Smiling, Manx sat down on a beanbag and invited her to do likewise. It wasn't clear if he'd been asleep or not – his hair was messy, but not much more than it had been earlier. Barefoot, he'd changed into a mustard-coloured singlet and some faded green cargo pants, which made him look a bit like a cocky lieutenant from a film about Vietnam. Solace glanced upstairs.

  ‘Who else came back?’

  ‘You, Electra, Jess, Evan. And Glide, but he left much earlier than everyone else. Did you meet him?’ When Solace shook her head, he shrugged. ‘Never mind. He's a weird bloke. Probably asleep upstairs. The others went to their place. Places. I mean, some of them live together, but not all.’

  Remembering her conversation with Paige, Solace had a premonition. ‘Out of idle curiosity, which ones?’

  ‘Harper, Laine and Paige. They've got another housemate, I think, but we've never seen him. Why?’

  ‘No particular reason.’ She bit her cheek.

  Manx chuckled. ‘You met Paige, then? That explains it. How she and Laine manage not to kill one another is a source of ongoing speculation. The bigger mystery is how Harper pu
ts up with it. Still, it seems to work. Somehow.’

  ‘Sorry for getting drunk,’ said Solace. ‘I've never actually, you know, with the group home… ’

  Manx waved a hand. ‘Don't worry about it. Evan's usually worse. In fact, we all had a bit too much last night. Electra hasn't stopped snoring. It's like a motorbike rally up there.’

  There was a pause, during which Solace contemplated these sleeping arrangements, blinked, opened her mouth, stared at Manx, and pointedly didn't ask the obvious question.

  ‘No,’ he said, and then, when she raised an eyebrow, ‘seriously. No. We just don't have that many mattresses – good ones, anyway. It's a bit like Dawson's Creek, you know, that show where the characters were always sleeping in each other's beds? Not that I ever actually watched it, and okay, yes, they pretty much did all end up sleeping together, but before that –’ He stopped. Solace was grinning broadly. Manx gave an embarrassed cough and fell silent.

  There was a moment of peace. From upstairs, Solace could hear the drifting sounds of sleeping people, familiar as a favourite shirt.

  ‘Can I stay here?’ she asked suddenly. The words, it seemed, had leapt from her mouth without filling in the requisite forms. Her hindbrain swore.

  ‘Sure,’ said Manx, impishly. ‘Why else do you think we dragged you back here?’

  The dim fish of memory stirred beneath the surface of Solace's subconscious.

  ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I thought it had more to do with here being closest and you dropping Jess on Evan too many times and everybody being entirely too drunk.’

  ‘Well,’ he conceded, plucking a cigarette from behind his right ear and lighting up with a yellow plastic Zippo from his pocket, ‘maybe a little. But you're welcome just the same. We're not the most normal bunch you're likely to find, though – sure you can handle us?’

  Remembering the bouncer, Solace only grinned.

  Infrequently Asked Questions

  It was, Solace thought, approximately Wednesday. Since moving into the warehouse a week and a half ago, she had discovered quite quickly that absenting oneself from the regimen of calendars, lessons, television schedules, and failing those, any pressing need to be somewhere else introduced a whole new concept of time. Time existed, but only in the sense that yesterday had become today and today would, sooner or later, become tonight, which was general cause for heading down to the Gadfly.